Written in Central Europe at the end of the 15th or during the 16th century, the origin, language, and date of the Voynich Manuscript—named after
the Polish-American antiquarian bookseller, Wilfrid M. Voynich, who acquired it in 1912—are still being debated as vigorously as its puzzling
drawings and undeciphered text. Described as a magical or scientific text, nearly every page contains botanical, figurative, and scientific drawings
of a provincial but lively character, drawn in ink with vibrant washes in various shades of green, brown, yellow, blue, and red.

Apparently no one has managed to translate the Voynich Manuscript successfully. An interesting mystery, to be sure.

About a century and a quarter ago, a slim pamphlet was published in Virginia, USA. Amazingly for such an unassuming little document, it has ruined
numerous lives, mostly through greed and obsession. It tells the story of buried treasure, and has snared the unwary ever since it was published. It
is hard to imagine a treasure more like 'fool's gold' than that described in The Beale Papers. The story revolves around a set of ciphers, that
have so far resisted every effort to break them. Fools, read on and become beguiled...

Supposedly, a man by the name of Thomas Beale left a locked box with an innkeeper named Robert Morris in Lynchburg, Virginia. When opened, the box
proved to contain several sheets of encoded script and no encryption key. Supposedly, the sheets (when decoded) would reveal the hidden fortune of
Thomas Beale, buried somewhere in Lynchburg, VA.

There are doubts as to the authenticity of the Beale Ciphers, with some claiming it is an elaborate hoax. Despite this, many people do believe in the
Beale Ciphers, and have spent years digging for the hidden treasure. I include it here, despite its possibly dubious nature, as it is an interesting
story (and quite similar to the movie "National Treasure" in many ways).

In 1908, Italian archaeologist Luigi Pernier discovered the Phaistos Disc in the Minoan palace site of Phaistos.

The Phaistos pictographs seem unrelated to Minoan hieroglyphs, and no other example of this script has been unearthed. Because the disc is unique, the
script remains undeciphered. (Several attempts have been made, but there is no concensus that any one is correct.) Curiously, given that only one
example of the script has been found, each pictograph is impressed into the clay disc with a stamp, rather than incised individually. If the disc was
intended to be a unique document, why go to the trouble of creating a set of stamps? And if other documents were made, why has none been found?
Another curiosity is that stratigraphic evidence dates the disc to about 1700 BCE, at which time another Minoan script was common. This script is
called Linear A. It appears to be derived from Minoan hieroglyphic and, like Mesopotamian cuneiform, the signs represent syllables rather than
individual sounds. This script, too, remains undeciphered for the most part.

The disc remains undeciphered, hence its reputation as one of the most enigmatic discoveries in archeology.

For 250 years it defied all code-breakers. Darwin had a go; Dickens, and Wedgwood too. But the 10-letter inscription - DOUOSVAVVM - carved into a
monument on the Shugborough Estate in Staffordshire thumbed its nose at the curious. Those of a romantic (or deluded) disposition believed it to be a
coded message of the kind used by the Knights Templar and their successors to point to the whereabouts of the Holy Grail or some other religious
relic. Others believed it to be a private affirmation of love.

According to some, the code has been deciphered. However, the experts disagree on what the code means; some believe it eludes to the Knights Templar
while others insist it is a simple poem to a lost love.

In 1864, the French lay missionary Eugène Eyraud -- the first known non-Polynesian resident of Earth's most isolated inhabited island, Easter Island
or Rapanui -- reported in a letter to his superior that he had seen there "in all the houses" hundreds of tablets and staffs incised with thousands
of hieroglyphic figures [Figure 1]. Two years later, only a small handful of these incised artefacts were left. Most rongorongo, as the unique objects
were subsequently called, had by then been burnt, hidden away in caves, or deftly cannibalized for boat planks, fishing lines, or honorific skeins of
human hair. The few Rapanui survivors of recent slave raids and contagions evidently no longer feared the objects' erstwhile tapu or sacred
prohibition.

Although it appears the Rongorongo might have been successfully translated, I'll let you follow the link and read about it for yourself.

So there you have it, ATS. A series of mysterious codes, all awaiting your perusal and decryption skills. Good luck, and enjoy!

Very interesting thread. One thing that has lead me to believe that the Shugborough may not be as old as is claimed is that it contains a U, and two
Vs, and in antiquity the letter U was often written as V.

Really nice thread. It is always interesting to see these unsolved mysteries

Although we can never truly know whether they were hoax or not, especially the latter ones. I once saw a documentary on the Voynich one, it covered it
pretty deeply and overally it was believed to be a hoax, yet it can never be truly proved, unless someone solves it

I think they will come to discover with the Voynich Manuscript that it is little more than someone's personal scientific journal. Illuminati perhaps.
The language was encoded because that was the common practice of the time for anything deemed heretical by the church. It would be cool to decipher
it, but I highly doubt it contains any real significant info.

...carved into a monument on the Shugborough Estate in Staffordshire thumbed its nose at the curious.

Its a monument that has a picture of three people scrutinizing a monument on it. I suddenly had this notion that somebody figured out a way to keep
people busy forever trying to figure it out. He probably snickered at all those who labored over it till his dying day...

...the solution might be there is no solution. Or when you get tired of trying to figure it out, you look up to notice that you are the observer in
the relief carving trying to figure it out. The penultimate Middle Ages troll...

Most of the plant identification is a little blurry in the VMS 408 (aka Voynich MS, approx 6 x 9 inches and 209 pages) in the Beinecke Rare Books
Library at Yale - (discovered at the Villa Mondragone in Frascati near Rome in 1912 by a Lithuanian spy turned book seller Wilfred Michal Vojnicz aka
Voynich) but the ones that have been identified seem to have fertility/abortive/gynocological implications, i.e. the book seems to be a gynocological
handbook which is heavilly laden with Astrology, the radiocarbon dating of the vellum (Calf skin) is c. 1420-1440 AD and seems to have written in the
area around Brescia (northern Italy, near Milano).

It is perhaps with a gynocological interest that the compiler of this coded herbal-manual sought to place things like dates and times for the best
chances of

a. getting pregnant

b. determining or influencing the sex of the foetus in advance through the use of Astrology

c. producing less symptomatic births (some of the plants are 'oxytoctic' i.e. used in antiquity to ease childbirth)

d. abortive (many of the plants are known poisons, e.g. Belladonna or plants that are known to cause spontaneous abortions)

e. cures for swollen ankles for pregnant women in the later stages (the socalled Balneological sections showing pregnant women walking around in a
greenish liquid in troughs or pipe like contraptions)

f. recipes at the end of the book for anything for cures for menstral cramps to skin whiteners to recipes for lowering blood pressure and even
possibly some make up concoctions...

Most of the human images are pregnant females, some of them holding stars by 'string attachments' - one cannot separate gynecology from the Voynich
MS without missing most of its meaning.

As for the weird coded script, it seems to be a shorthand for Medical Italian and Medical Latin with each 'word' an anagram for the correct one
(e.g. in modern English letter script the code would work like:

This content community relies on user-generated content from our member contributors. The opinions of our members are not those of site ownership who maintains strict editorial agnosticism and simply provides a collaborative venue for free expression.